Is Ruby on Rails a good first programming language to learn?

Interested in computer programming?

Where do you start?

Well this first task can be daunting. I myself have searched and googled this question on many occasions. I found that searching this topic took me down quite the rabbit hole.

Some of the challenges that I found when researching this topic were

-Computer programming is a vast topic with years of history

-Many programmers are biased based on their programming language of choice

-Which programming language gains popularity and the direction of programming is difficult to speculate on

You don't have to be a computer programmer or tech wizard to come up with some qualifications for a first programming language to learn. You may consider

-What role do I want?

-What are other students learning?

-What are other professionals using?

-What roles are available and how much do they pay?

For the simplicity of this article I am going to break the roles down into

Web Development

-Front End

-Back End

-Full Stack

and

Desktop Developer

Let's look at some data to help us gain a better understanding of these roles and how popular they are. I recently learned that Stack Overflow has taken a survey on various topics related to software development in 2023. Remember, this doesn't necessarily encompass all developers as not everyone has participated in this survey.

As you can see below, 33.48% of developers are full-stack, 17.88% of developers are back-end, 6.6% of developers are front-end and 5.08% of developers build desktop applications.

What are other professionals and students using?

Professionals

Students

At the time of this survey, 65.82% of professional developers were using JavaScript, and 60.51% of those learning to code were using JavaScript. It is clear that JavaScript is a popular language. It is an ever evolving language with many libraries and frameworks to choose from. However, I am going to take some time to look at Ruby. Ruby is a popular language, however, is it a good idea to learn it when first beginning to code?

One of Ruby's strengths is you can earn a good salary

According to "Programming in Ruby: A Critical Look at the Pros and Cons", some more pros are

-Agile and fast development

-Budget friendly

-well developed ruby community

-compatible with other front-end frameworks

Some of Ruby's weaknesses are

-According to stack overflows survey again, only 2.55% of students are learning Ruby and 6.94% of professional developers are using it. -It is less flexible with non-standard features

In conclusion if you are looking to become a software developer, I believe JavaScript would be a good language to learn to begin with. Based on the above data, I think that Ruby, although a language with many pros and potential for a great salary tied to it, it's less popular. JavaScript is a simple programming language with many uses and much popularity. That is the first language I learned after html and css so I may have a bias. But for the reasons mentioned above, if I had to start over, I would still pick JavaScript.

References

Programming in Ruby: A Critical Look at the Pros and Cons | Geek Culture (medium.com)

Pros and cons of Ruby software development | The Codest Salary: Ruby On Rails Developer in Canada 2024 | Glassdoor